There is something incredibly wrong with this. Sakuragaoka, what have you done? I'm beginning to think this so-called "Passport Resurrection" is no resurrection, nor does it have anything to do with SEGA whatsoever.
All right, first of all, this "Sakuragaoka" guy is an odd one. Days before he signed up as Sakuragaoka, he also signed up as Mr. Zero, TOP CAT, and Giwara, three names of Muecas members:
http://shenmue.com/muecas/000.html. After doing a little research, it was clear the same person signed up as all three accounts, because he always uses the same "enccompany" e-mail account for every account. A real Muecas member? Not hardly.
Take a look.
http://www2.sega.co.jp/bbs/article/s/shenmue/12/nwcocd/nwcocd.html#nwcocd some clown appeared on the official Shenmue BBS a while back trying to offer a Spanish section for the site. Ah! Guess what... the link to his site is on ENCCOMPANY.com.
http://enccompany.iwarp.com/shenmue_com_main.htm. Enccompany... Ring any bell? The same as the e-mail account Sakuragaoka, and his other 3 egos had. So why was he so persistent to sign up using the name of a Muecas member? But this guy's strangeness doesn't end there. He also posted in the official BBS later as "BBS管理人", pretending to be BBS staff, saying, "新しいシェンムーIIIBBSです." meaning "This is the Shenmue III BBS" or something like that.
http://www2.sega.co.jp/bbs/article/s/shenmue/16/wiftil/wiftil.html#wiftil. And his reason for making this confusing post was this:
http://www2.sega.co.jp/bbs/article/s/shenmue/16/wiftil/ynqitl.html#ynqitl
"BBS_People
Kiyuu, sorry... mmm... What I can say you? That day I was really bored and decepcioned because that person "BBS管理人", never post something diferent than "新しいシェンムーBBSです", I was trying to give some hope to the Shenmue players here, but I confused the persons. Please forgive me. Wasn't my intention. Please tell to they, the real "BBS管理人" uses a special color in their posts. Please continue supporting Shenmue, because with your actions you keep alive our hope.... Thanks for all your help, maybe I'll never post something here and this will be better for all. Please forgive me again."
So you like to pretend to be SEGA staff and give Shenmue players "hope," eh, Sakuragaoka? Interesting. So you're doing it again? I've noticed something very odd about the timing of this Passport "resurrection," which really makes him look guilty of setting this up somehow. Just hours before he posted the topic about the Passport coming back, he posted this topic, asking if anyone had the Shenmue Goodies:
http://shenmue.planets.gamespy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=29094 Ah, funny! Hiiiiilarious. SOME of the VMU Goodies were available for download on the Passport again, which so happened to be the SAME ones that are available on the site Kiyuu linked him to. Very interesting. If SEGA were really updating it, they could have easily restored all 300+ of them at once, not just 180 of them.
Another fishy thing... Before the site folders in passport.shenmue.com became hidden, it said the files were uploaded early Feb. 22nd, which was just a few hours before he made this topic. He decided to go through all the trouble of linking his PC to DC to get online to view the Passport,(
as he stated before he doesn't even have a dial-up connection) just to view the Passport's online features HOURS after they update it. WOW! Perfect timing? I think NOT! And I also noticed his name was active in the forums during the time the folders I linked to became hidden. That's because he saw my links and wanted to prevent me from snooping around his "plan."
How exactly he got access to passport.shenmue.com, I don't know, but the few files that were restored were easily obtainable files that someone like himself could have gotten. Why the hell would SEGA bring the U.S. version back first? And why the hell would they use that same broken English line on the update for the Japanese version? If you look in the Passport's 1st_read.bin file with a hex editor, you can see every directory to passport.shenmue.com where it reads the data from, and the only difference between the different versions is one folder name. The files for the U.S. version are in the folder "passport_us," while Japan's is "passport_jp" and "passport_eu" for European. All he had to do was create these additional folders and dump these files into them, and VOILA! Now users with those versions can download these same files.
I am
HIGHLY disappointed with this. I want answers, Sakuragaoka, and I want them now. I'm sure everyone else does too. I know this isn't the official work of SEGA, so don't even try to play me.